The murder of abortion provider George Tiller should force a re-assessment of the Department of Homeland Security's maligned report on "right wing extremism."
I was thoroughly dumbfounded at the conservative reaction to that report in April. If you read the report, it was quite clearly aimed a serious, violent, insane extremists. Yet mainstream conservatives took great offense, accusing the Obama administration of chillingly targeting the free-speech of conscientious anti-abortion citizens, veterans and conservatives writ large..
Conservatives should have said, "Here! Here! We applaud the efforts to clamp down on terrorism, crime and extremists." After all, most conservatives have nothing to do with, and deplore, violent extremists. Instead, by saying the report was an attack on conservatism in general, the conservatives -- not the government -- blurred the lines between the violent extremes and the conservative mainstream.
Now, it turns out that the man in custody on suspicion of assassinating Tiller, Scott Roeder, had been arrested back in 1996 on criminal use of explosives and had connections to an extremist anti-government militia group, the Freeman: On April 17, 1996, Associated Press reported:
"Roeder was stopped because his car didn't have a legitimate license plate. Instead, it had a tag indicating the driver was a "sovereign" citizen and immune from Kansas law. The same type of tag is sometimes used by Freemen, whose members in Montana are in the fourth week of a standoff with federal agents.Roeder's name is included on an FBI list of Freemen, said Shawnee County Sheriff Dave Meneley.
In Roeder's trunk, authorities found fuse cord, a pound of gunpowder and two nine-volt batteries, one wired to a switch - the alleged triggering device. Ammunition and a blasting cap also were found in the car."
In other words, we'll have to wait on the details on both cases but at first glance Roeder seems exactly the sort of person that the DHS warned about.
The report suggested that the bad economy and the election of a black president could stimulate more anger and activity from "violent anti-government groups." Far from attacking anti-abortion activists in general, as many claimed, the report instead noted white supremacists' "longstanding exploitation of social issues such as abortion."
We'll see if Roeder maintained his ties to the militia groups or had shifted his focus to abortion only, but at a minimum, conservatives have to make a new choice: take seriously right wing extremists -- the real ones, not the bloviators -- or run the risk of truly being lumped together.
In a way, conservatives now face a choice similar to what liberals in the late 1960s and early 1970s faced during the hayday of the Weather Underground. Some on the New Left defended them as legitimate-albeit-excitable members of their broad coalition, while other more traditional liberals attacked them as extremists who violated liberal ideals. My sense of the history is that enough on the New Left defended extremists to tar all of liberalism. Will that happen for conservatives now?
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This is revisionist.
Conservatives didn't reject the alert that right wing groups were prowling the countryside. They were complaining about how the report appeared to single them out based on their beliefs.
Whether you agree with that or not, a murder of an abortion provider by a person who has ties to sovereign movement groups that (startlingly) predate the report doesn't resolve the issue of whether the report was responsible or irresponsible.
What you're doing is analogous to the following example:
(1) Agency publishes study that shows that crime has increased among a certain group.
(2) Members of that group complain that the language of the report is culturally insensitive
(3) Agency itself apologizes for language in certain parts of the report that they acknowledge is insensitive
(4) A few weeks later, a member of that group is arrested and charged with a crime.
(5) You publish a silly editorial arguing that people were crazy to get upset about the report because, "look, one of them committed a crime."
Realize that there are two different points in this debate--and they aren't incompatible
(1) right wing nuts commit crimes; they may feel even nuttier because the people they support aren't getting elected; they may act nuttier
(2) the DHS report painted with a broad brush, and offended people who aren't nuts or criminals.
mookie,
The trouble with your quiet, calm reasonable analysis is that the report wasn't talking about the Buckleys, Noonans and Douthats of this world.
Not even the about Coulter.
This action was what the report was warning against.
Now, over the last eight years (and many before) those of us to the left of Genghis Kahn have had to live with being called "Defeatocrats" "Socialists" "Marxists" "America-Haters" "The Anti-Christ" "Baby-Killers" "People who marry rocks" "Pedophiles"....and even worse. These claims came from the right - and not necessarily from the dangerous right.
Sure, I can understand that the return to constitutional government after eight years under Bush has been disconcerting. What this report did was to bring a dangerous group back into focus - while in no way dimensioning the dangerous people who also exist on the left.
These days and the next few are not a good time for folks on the right to be lecturing those of us on the left. This is a very good time for those of you on the right to be taking a close look at the language of hatred and the de-humanization of your political opponents which has become the norm for your side.
Thus, since the word of God determines that no life (nor eye, nor tooth, nor hand, nor foot) is taken in an induced miscarriage, then life cannot begin with conception, and abortion is not murder, in any so-called "Judeo-Christian" tradition.
That's "heyday" not "hayday". The expression does not refer to a happy day you scythe the grass and stack it up for the cows to eat in the winter. The "hey" part is from Middle English, kinda like you might say "hey dude how's it goin'".
There have been other recent murders that were perpetrated by "rightwing" nutjobs such as the Pittsburgh cop killings and two more cops killed in Ocaloosa County, Florida. Both suspects were reportedly flirting with white supremacist and militia groups and were fearful of Obama directed gun bans. I think as 2009 continues, we will see even more incidents that will validate the main findings of the DHS report. Just yesterday, I saw a news article online about a "disgruntled" military vet in West Virginia who was arrested for an Obama threat. Is that enough proof?
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